We are super excited to announce that we have become an official Google Adwords Partners in Dubai, and we’re receiving more and more requests of people asking us if they need Google Adwords (Hoorah!). Today we’d like to share with you some tips to know if you need an Adwords campaign to help boost your online business or not.
Google Adwords is a program made by Google that provides you the option to display your ads on a selection of keywords that people type when looking for products online – Search Network – or to display a text or illustrated ads on specific websites – Display Network. The catch is you’ll pay each time someone click on your ads.
Google Adwords Benefits
The main benefits of Google Adwords is to give you the possibility to rank on the top page for some keywords that you select based on the interests and searches conducted by your customers. Google Adwords offers you some interesting features to help you rank:
- List of keywords people use to find you
- Bidding options: You can decide to setup bid or let Google do it for you
- Extensions: you can easily display specific links below your ads, like your phone number or address.
- Ready to use: You activate it today and your ads are published immediately.
- Cookie Tracking: You can set-up conversions to see if people who have clicked your ad have made a purchase within 30 days after they click on your ads
Google Adwords Limits
In spite of being a free to use tool -as in you just pay for your campaigns for either clicks or for a thousand impressions – Google Adwords can cost you lots of money if you do not optimize it. The idea is to pay to get your ads displayed, but then Google will rank and charge you based on :
- Your max bidding strategy
- Your landing page quality
- Relevancy of your ads with respect to / keywords / landing page
So if don’t know enough about Google Adwords, you’ll end up with a non optimized campaign when people click on the ads when they’re really not looking for your products.
Who can use Google Adwords
Anyone can use it. However some people, like our team, have the Google Certification or turn into Google Partners. It will help us to get more accurate skills to develop a sound Google Adwords strategy. Once again, it’s up to you to decide if you need someone with that expertise or not.
1- Define your Digital Strategy
First step is to know if you’re actually looking for more traffic or if you have a specific product or services to sell. The best will be to ask your customers if:
- They use Internet to find services like yours
- Found you online
- How do they usually buy your products
If you feel there are some opportunities, it’s time to move on !
2- Review your current competition
In order to do that, you can:
- List all your products and services
- Check the ones with more margins
- Check the ones you could sell without stock or delivery issues
- Create a keyword list around your products and services
Once it’s done, you just have to Google your services and see how difficult it’s gonna be to rank in a natural environment-use Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool – or adwords -check how many ads display on those searches.
Then you just have to add those results into your excel:
- Low Difficulty Score + No ads = Try SEO first
- Low Difficulty Score + Ads = Try SEO first
- Medium Difficulty Score + Ads = Go for Ads
- Medium Difficulty Score + No ads = Try SEO first
- Hard Difficulty Score + Ads = Go for Ads or forget this service
- Hard Difficulty Score + No ads = Go for Ads
3- Select best margin products and estimate ROI
Then use Google keywords planner to check the average CPC and competition on each keyword. Then try to link:
- Service Category
- Margin
- Conversion rate
- Maximum you can afford to generate one purchase
- Anaytics tracking ready to use
Keep in mind that you’ll pay to drive leads to your website, so if you can get this traffic for free with a smart SEO strategy don’t hesitate. However it can be interested to use some ads budget to kick start the campaign until you rank in Google SERP. Afterwards you should get a list telling you which services or product it may interested to go for using adwords.
4- Fix KPI and test
Now you know which products you’d like to promote on line. So check:
- How long you’ll need to create a campaign
- Do you have current existing Landing Page with Tracking codes
- What’s your maximum budget for one sale
Then you just have to go and test it. Ideally you can try on a month time and see if you increase your online sales or not. Don’t hesitate to contact Google support to check you’re doing it right.
5- Take a decision
After a month test you can:
- Check how many purchases people have made
- Check how much you spent
- Check how many hours you spent on that
- Check your ROI
- Review your analytics
Once you have all this information, its up to you to check if you feel there is something you can do to increase your online purchases or if its better to invest your time and money on something else.
Is it always working ?
No. Keep in mind that, it’s just a general step by step to help you to understand adwords and get an idea of the potential. Most probably you will struggle to create your first campaign, when an adwords specialist could drive you faster results.
In any case, it’s always important for you to get an idea of the process and be ready to think more about it or not.